There's not much Booster Gold to be found in your Local Comic Shop today. If you need a fix, you'll need to shell out $150 for the latest Final Crisis collection, Final Crisis Omnibus.

Booster appears in exact 2 panels in this 1,500+ page book, both taking place at — Spoiler Alert! — Martian Manhunter's funeral.

Here, I'll save you $150.

Final Crisis #2 (2008)

Final Crisis: Requiem #1 (2008)

You'll get a better look at the same event in Harley Quinn #67.

Of course, if you still want that omnibus, your Local Comic Shop appreciates your business.

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Introducing Booster Gold to a whole know audience, 52 transformed our hero from a much-maligned B-list wannabe into The Greatest Hero The World Has Never Known.

Thanks to the talents of J.G. Jones and Alex Sinclair, the series has a bunch of great covers, some of which don't even feature Booster Gold. However, one stands above the others in my lists of favorites: the cover to 52 Week Fifteen (2006).

Art by J.G. Jones, color by Alex Sinclair

The cover is deceptively simple, conveying a very complex situation with a minimum of content. Too many modern comics eschew character dialog on their covers and as a result look like nothing more than out-of-context pin-up splash pages. However, this issue leans into the photographic trend by emulating the cover of photo-news magazines like Newsweek. The effect adds realism (and thusly viewer engagement and empathy) to the apparent tragedy it shows. What's happening here? Inquiring minds want to know!

Though it makes good use of the modern "no speech balloons" aesthetic, it also calls back to the Silver Age of DC Comics when covers were created first and the writers had to solve the challenges they teased. Booster Gold's broken goggles, blood, Supernova floating above the Metropolis skyline... the cover promises volumes before you ever turn a page. In addition to good art, it's also good storytelling.

And the best part is that the context of this image changes once you've finished the whole series and look back at it.

Now that's Boosterrific!

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Although I tried on Monday, I can't say enough good things about this week's new hardcover reprint Booster Gold: The Big Fall.

In addition to all the great art, the book contains a 25-page "The Making of Booster Gold" appendix of historical detail, including among other things the aforementioned original art for Booster Gold #6, some promotional material from DC, pictures of Jurgens' original model for Skeets, and key to today's post, Jurgens' original pitch for the series, which reads in part:

Metropolis University, 2162. Twentieth Century Super Heroes 101 is in session and Professor Fairmont drones on and on. Michael Stewart, former amateur athlete surpreme and star quarterback of the football team is bored. To him, super heroes are a boring lot. A bunch of do gooders who just didn't know how to take advantage of a good situation.

Did you catch that? In Jurgen's original pitch, Booster Gold's "real" name was to be Micheal Stewart!

If you think that bit of ephemeral comic book trivia is as cool as I do, you'll love Booster Gold: The Big Fall, now available at your Local Comic Shop — and coming to bookstores next month, just in time for Christmas shopping season.

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